Hi Paul,I went BB earlier this year with NTL so have a basic (very <g>) understanding and I do work with PCs, but so far that hasn't helped much LOL
From posts on the Nthell forum it seems most of their techies prefer routers with in-built firewalls, they consider them better than the s/ware firewalls. Also they are annoyed at NTL supplying USB cable modems because they find them a source of trouble unlike a network card, so your switch there was the right move.
If you only have one PC normally connecting to the 'Net I personally don't see the point in buying a router, I think it would just add another bit of kit to go wrong and possibly complicate things.
I use 2 PCs networked together using ICS on Win98SE and have had no problems although I know others have had stability problems with it.
The beauty of using 2 PCs, especially for flying with Vatsim is that one PC can run FS and virtually nothing else while the other, connected to the 'Net, can run FS Meteo, SB, RW and anything else you want.
The 2 PCs are connected with UTP cross-over cable and use Pete's WideFS to 'talk'.
Below are some links that may be of benefit.
http://www.dslreports.com/tweaks
http://www.networklab.co.uk/cmodem/
http://www.practicallynetworked.com/sharing/ics/ics.htm
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robin.d.h.walker/
Rgds
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